Erick and Rich chat about the coronavirus pandemic's effect on hardware sales, surveying your clients about when they'll return to the office (if ever), and the recent spike in people who say they're locked down at home with a ghost.

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ICYMI: Our Channel News Roundup for the Week of February 5th

HP revving up its 3D print portfolio, Intel pulling up its SoCs, and the possibility of financial assistance towards the purchase of an iPhone X from a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” are among the stories we’re belatedly catching up to. By James E. Gaskin

What a fun week for roller coaster fans! On the up side, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket successfully. Unfortunately, Elon parked his Tesla Roadster in the rocket storage module rather than a garage, meaning it will take a really, really long time for the valet to run out and get it.

On the down side, the stock market finally succumbed to gravity and made a “correction,” meaning it dropped 10 percent from the most recent high. Just remember the most recent high is much higher than ever before, after years of trending up.

Know what else is still trending up? News that zoomed past us like a Tesla on the way to Mars. Here’s some we grabbed as it went by.

HP products rev up. 3D printing has become so common it hardly makes the news anymore. Leave it to HP to rev up the printer product line with the new HP Jet Fusion 300 and 500 series (pictured). Not just a new nameplate, these printers (which list at prices “starting in the $50,000s”) produce functional parts in black, white, and (way cool) full color. Can we place an order now for our Star Trek replicator?

Other big-time vendors need some love, too. Intel’s new Xeon D-2100 system-on-chip aims to power new functions for edge computing, networking, and data center solutions. And Johnny-on-the-spot Supermicro was right there with a product line based on the new SoC. Say howdy to the X11SDV series motherboard.

Dell EMC rolled out a new platform to help small and midsize companies get enterprise-level data protection. Say hello to the Dell EMC Data Domain DD3300 (pictured).

Teamwork is on display, at least according to Cisco, Apple, Aon, and Allianz. Get cyber resilience evaluation services from Aon and enhanced cyber insurance from Allianz. Cisco and Apple provide the power.

NETGEAR plans to spin off its Arlo products unit, which makes digital cameras (mobile, wireless, and even a baby monitor). The IPO will leave NETGEAR with the majority of shares and didn’t stop the company from introducing its new M4300-96X Stackable 10G and 40G Modular Managed Switch to daylight at the Integrated Systems Europe show in Amsterdam.

Check Point pulled the curtain back on the CloudGuard product family, including the CloudGuard SaaS. All part of the Check Point Infinity architecture. What will they call the next update, infinity plus 1?

Comodo Security Solutions teamed up with Optimus to offer Thunder DNS. No, not a new wrestling takedown, a next-generation domain name system software solution for better cybersecurity.

Epson put the sunglasses on to announce the world’s first 12,000 lumen native 4K 3LCD laser projector. The Pro L20000U, for large venues, glows with 20,000 lumens. Not done yet, Epson also introduced its new PowerLite L-Series projectors.

Cloud networking player Aerohive pulled the covers off Aerohive A3, which will offer hybrid cloud-access management when it rolls out in Q2 2018, not to mention what it calls “the industry’s first pluggable, enterprise-class Wi-Fi access point.”

TPx, managed services carrier, signed Converged Network Services Group (CNSG) as a national master agent.

IGEL, endpoint management software, expanded its North American IT channel into Canada with a sales office in Toronto. Citrix alum Michael Berman is its first sales engineer the Great White North, and Ken Shipman will be country manager.

Egenera, provider of wholesale, channel-only cloud services to the global IT market, announced that its Xterity Cloud Services is fully compliant with the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers Europe (CISPE) Code of Conduct for Data Protection.

Speaking of clouds, the seventh Cisco Global Cloud Index (2016-2021) just came out. Guess what? Clouds keep growing, thanks to both biz and consumer apps. ERP, collaboration, and analytics keep the enterprise’s nose in the clouds. To handle all this, Citrix expects 628 global hyperscale data centers, up from 338 in 2016. By 2021, 94 percent of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centers.

PagerDuty (a digital operations management vendor) released its inaugural research on the State of IT Work-Life Balance. There’s a balance? Not for a quarter of IT folks who hope to jump from one employer to another to improve their work-life balance. Nearly half (49 percent) of IT folks in the U.S. say that personal life (or sleep) is interrupted between 11 and 30 times—a week. Not a month, a week. Three surveys of over 800 IT pros in the US, Australia, and the UK provided the deets.

ABI Research’s Thing Identity and Management Services report pegs IoT platform services as a $21.5 billion market opportunity by 2022. Hot growth in the next five years should come from industrial, manufacturing, and automotive market verticals. Keep an eye on expanding security, cryptography, digital certificated management, and data exchange services.

Grand View Research tags the managed print services market as reaching $49.7 billion by 2025. That’s up from $26.72 billion in 2016, with large enterprises expected to generate over $34.43 billion in revenue by 2025.

Stats for the romantically clueless. Houston Asset Management provides an annual “Cost of Loving Index” based on nine popular Valentine gifts. They’ve been at this since 1990, so pay attention. Good news: prices are about the same as last year. Bad news: while a romantic four-course candlelight dinner for two costs about six percent less this year, you’re almost too late to make a reservation by now. Movie prices are up nine percent, and mushy cards are up 19 percent. Over half of U.S. adults (55 percent) will spend an average of $143.56 on V-Day gifts for loved ones, family, friends, and pets this year. So reclaim some of that work-life balance and stay out of the doghouse.

When you need a loan shark to float your Apple iPhone X, call Goldman Sachs. How did we get here? Apple priced the iPhone X at a grand and up, and credit cards charge amazingly high interest rates based on the fact the Fed gives them money for a pittance. So CNBC, quoting the Wall Street Journal, says Goldman Sachs is offering to step in and provide “easy financing” at Apple Stores.

Maybe Tim Cook and other Apple executives have the sense to say no to Goldman. Or maybe Tim will use some of the $261 billion in cash ($200+ billion overseas) to offer decent loan rates to customers dying to pocket the iPhone X.

Get an edge on the competition

With each issue packed full of powerful news, reviews, analysis, and advice targeting IT channel professionals, ChannelPro-SMB will help you cultivate your SMB customers and run your business more profitably.